NY TIMES– After five decades of guerrilla struggle and two million lives lost, the flags are flapping proudly here in this capital. The new national anthem is blasting all over town. People are toasting oversize bottles of White Bull beer (the local brew), and children are boogieing in the streets.

“Free at Last,” reads a countdown clock.

But from the moment it declares independence on Saturday, the Republic of South Sudan, the world’s newest country and Africa’s 54th state, will take its place at the bottom of the developing world. A majority of its people live on less than a dollar a day. A 15-year-old girl has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than she does of finishing primary school. More than 10 percent of children do not make it to their fifth birthday. About three-quarters of adults cannot read. Only 1 percent of households have a bank account.

Beyond that, the nation faces several serious insurrections within its own sprawling territory and hostilities with northern Sudan, its former nemesis.

It is clearly an underdog story.

So many people here embody the distance traveled and the hopes to come. James Aguto, a former child soldier and longtime guerrilla fighter, now delivers babies. Mr. Aguto is a newly minted clinical officer, working in a government hospital, and his journey from taking life to sustaining it makes him an apt symbol for the transition this country is trying to make.

“There was one night I delivered six babies, six babies in one night!” he said. “I was so happy. I was making development here. I was showing that I had skills.”

Mr. Aguto now wants to be a doctor. “I have that spirit,” he explained.

The nation will certainly need it. More than 2,300 people have been killed in ethnic and rebel violence this year, with at least a half-dozen rebel groups, some with thousands of fighters, prowling the bush, attacking government soldiers, terrorizing civilians, and stealing cattle and even children.

Read the full article about South Sudan, the Newest Nation, Is Full of Hope and Problems.

© 2011 New York Times

Photo by Flickr user UN Photos

MEDIA ROOTS- Media Roots sits down for a short conversation with Chris Hedges, an American journalist, author, and war correspondent. Hedges gives a sobering take on American culture, relaying a grim yet powerful perspective on the current political and societal state of the US.

ALTERNET– What happens when you fail to invest in education (and no, I don’t mean investment in excessive layers of school administration), the most important single item in our nation’s success or failure? You end up with this result:

An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin. […]

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called “higher order” thinking skills. Read more: link

By the time our kids get to college it is too late to change habits por learn new skills that should have been taught to them in grade k-12 in my opinion. This study does not merely condemn colleges, it throws a harsh light on our primary education system on this country. In general, the US doesn’t pay our teachers well (compared to other professions and other nations), nor do we reward them for excellence, nor do we often provide them with a system that accurately assesses their efforts (i.e., No child left behind ring any bells?).

Continue reading about Students Not Learning Critical Thinking in College.

Photo by flickr user Shutterhacks

© COPYRIGHT ALTERNET, 2011

NEWS JUNKIE POST– America incarcerates more of it’s citizens than any other country in the world.  With only 5% of the world population, America has more than 25% of the world’s prisoners.  America is either the country with the most criminals in the world, the country that has become the greatest police state in the world, or the country whom, with profit as the motive for all that is done, has found a way to exploit it’ population through incarceration for monetary gain.

The steep incline in the number of Americans incarcerated began in 1980.  Since that time the number of Americans incarcerated has jumped from under 500,000 people to close to 2,500,000.   The advent of private prisons during that time has created a powerful lobby, on behalf of its Wall Street investors, to lengthen sentences.  Longer sentences means more prisoners.  More prisoners means more prisons.  More prisoners, and more prisons, means more profit.  As a result, Americans now spend almost $70 billion a year on a corrections system (including prison, probation and parole) being run largely for profit.

A similar scheme by lobbyists has resulted in a system that exploits education, and has an equally negative affect on society.  Lobbyists have repeatedly, and successfully, argued for the increase in financial aid to students.  Rather than this assistance being passed on to students, privately run Universities have simply raised tuition.

“They are a business — higher ed must be a viewed as a business. Like any other business, what they are all about is making more money..,” states Dr. Marty Nemko, an advisor, career counselor, talk radio host, and prolific blogger, as quoted in the Daily Caller.

In addition to the exploitation of post-secondary school students, elementary and secondary students are hit particularly hard by systemic inequalities which promote self-perpetuating cycles of inadequate education and rising incarceration.  As Steven Hawkins wrote in his article ‘Education vs Incarceration’ last month;

This trade-off between education and incarceration is particularly acute at the community level. In many urban neighborhoods where millions of dollars are spent to lock up residents, the education infrastructure is crippled. As the prison population skyrocketed in the past three decades, researchers began to notice that high concentrations of inmates were coming from a few select neighborhoods — primarily poor communities of color — in major cities. These were dubbed “million — dollar blocks” to reflect that spending on incarceration was the predominant public — sector investment in these neighborhoods. NAACP research shows that matching zip codes to high rates of incarceration also reveals where low-performing schools, as measured by math proficiency, tend to cluster. The lowest-performing schools tend to be in the areas where incarceration rates are the highest. The following [example is] instructive.

Continue reading about Incarceration Rates Going Up as Education Goes Down.

Photo by Flickr user Bob Jagendorf

© COPYRIGHT NEWS JUNKIE POST, 2011

THE INDEPENDENT/UK – Soldiers, soldiers everywhere. In the valleys, on the mountains, in the streets of Beirut. I have never seen so many soldiers. Are they going to “liberate” Jerusalem? Or are they going to destroy all the Arab dictatorships?

They are supposed to stop the country of Lebanon from sliding into a civil war, I suppose. Hezbollah, we are told, has destroyed the government – which is true up to a point. For on Monday, so we are told, the Hague tribunal of the United Nations will tell us that members of Hezbollah killed the former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.

America demands that the tribunal name the guilty men. So does France. And so, of course, does Britain. Which is strange, because in 2005, when Mr Hariri was killed 366 metres from me on the Beirut Corniche, we all believed that the Syrians had killed him. Not the President, mind you. Not Bashar Assad, but the security services of the Syrian Baath party. That’s what I believed then. That’s what I still believe. But we are told now that it will be Hezbollah, Syria’s friend and Iran’s militia (albeit Lebanese) in Lebanon. And now America and Britain are beating the drum of litigation.

Hezbollah must be blamed and of course, the Prime Minister – or, to be correct, the former prime minister of Lebanon Saad Hariri, son of Rafiq – has just lost his job.

There are many who believe that Lebanon will now descend into a civil war, similar to the fratricidal conflict which it endured from 1976 to 1980. I doubt it. A new generation of Lebanese, educated abroad – in Paris, in London, in America – have returned to their country and, I suspect, will not tolerate the bloodshed of their fathers and grandfathers.

In theory, Lebanon no longer has a government, and the elections which were fairly held and which gave Saad Hariri his cabinet are no more. President Michel Suleiman will begin formal talks on Monday to try to create a new government.

But what does Hezbollah want? Is it so fearful of the Hague tribunal that it needs to destroy this country? The problem with Lebanon is perfectly simple, even if the Western powers prefer to ignore it. It is a confessional state. It was created by the French, the French mandate after the First World War. The problem is that to become a modern state it must de-confessionalise. But Lebanon cannot do so. Its identity is sectarianism and that is its tragedy. And it has, President Sarkozy please note, a French beginning point.

The Shias of Lebanon, of which Hezbollah is the leading party, are perhaps 40 per cent of the population. The Christians are a minority. If Lebanon has a future, it will be in due course be a Shia Muslim country. We may not like this; the West may not like this. But that is the truth. Yet Hezbollah does not want to run Lebanon. Over and over again, it has said it does not want an Islamic republic. And most Lebanese accept this.

But Hezbollah has made many mistakes. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, talks on television as if he is the President. He would like another war with Israel, ending in the “divine victory” which he claims his last war, in 2006, ended in. I fear the Israelis would like another war too. The Lebanese would prefer not to have one. But they are being pushed further and further into another war which Lebanon’s supposed Western friends seem to want. The Americans and the British would like to hurt Iran. And that is why they would like Hezbollah to be blamed for Mr Hariri’s murder – and for the downfall of the Lebanese government.

And it is perfectly true that Hezbollah does want this government to fall. By getting rid of this government, getting rid of this cabinet, it has broken the rules of the Doha agreement, which stated that the government and security services of Lebanon should not be harmed.

It is effectively wiping out the Arab “solution” to the Lebanese sectarian conundrum, and what – with the help of its Christian allies – is turning Lebanon into a frightened state. No wonder there were no drivers on the roads yesterday. No wonder the Lebanese were so frightened to go out and enjoy the Mediterranean sun. We are all frightened.

But I think the Lebanese state has grown up. I noticed, yesterday, that the Christian leader of the Lebanese Forces, one of the Christian militias, Samir Geagea, had a new photograph on the front of his party offices in a mountain town. But he was wearing civilian clothes. He was wearing a suit and tie. Not the militia costume he use to wear. That was a good sign.

No civil war in Lebanon.

Click to read the full article, Lebanon in Limbo: A Nation Haunted by the Murder of Rafiq Hariri.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper.  He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

Photograph by Flickr user conjure1